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Not sure about the plans relative to buying or building their own crm except
to say they will probably integrate with Great Plains on the .Net platform.
I understand they currently have a big push to get Siebel fully integrated
onto the .Net platform.

"Microsoft is planning to take the wraps off its MSCRM application at the
Great Plains Convergence customer conference in Orlando, Fla., in mid-March,
say sources close to the company. At that time, Microsoft officials,
including Chairman Bill Gates and Senior Vice President Doug Burgum, are
expected to show off a beta of MSCRM."

"Sources close to the company say they don't expect Microsoft to ship
Version One of MSCRM until late in 2002, at best. And customers who want a
.NET-ified version of the MSCRM suite will have to wait for a future version
to be able to take advantage of Microsoft's Web-services architectural
underpinnings, sources say."

They are also a huge Siebel user....probably at least the same number of
salesforce "seats" as Prof. Svcs. & Support seats on Clarify (as indicated
below). Keep in mind, Microsoft and its future MSCRM resellers/integrators
are likely to target the upper middle market (companies with annual revenue
from $ 500 million to $ 1 billion). This is also consistent with Great
Plains' targeting. So, I wouldn't expect Microsoft weaning from either
Clarify or Siebel until MSCRM is proven at their type of enterprise
scale.....maybe a couple of years out.
-- George

We recently had a presentation from the Gatner Group. They claim that MS is
"this close" to buying an existing CRM (rather than creating their own).
Further, Gartner is claiming (privately) that the candidate is Onyx.

By now this news must have spread to all members. However in case this has
missed the members attention, I reproduce a report which came from Aberdeen

Microsoft Enters CRM Market with MS CRM:

Microsoft dropped a fairly large stone into the Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) pond with the announcement of its MS CRM product last week.
Targeted at the small and mid-range CRM market, MS CRM will closely
resemble - and integrate with - the Microsoft Office Suite and core
Microsoft technologies, including .NET and SQL Server. MS CRM is also one of
the first - and, to date, the most significant - .NET applications announced
by Microsoft or any of its partners. .

This announcement is a major departure from the strategy it has followed
over the past five years, namely, providing infrastructure-level software to
CRM application vendors such as FrontRange, Onyx, PeopleSoft, Pivotal,
SalesLogix, SAP, Siebel, and others.MS CRM represents a baseline set of CRM
capabilities designed to provide marketing, sales, and support functionality
for the small and midsize business.

MS CRM will closely resemble Microsoft Outlook, and will integrate with
other Microsoft desktop and server applications such as Word, Excel, and SQL
Server. The objective here is to leverage Microsoft's presence on the
desktop and to offer a familiar user interface to the small business user.MSCRM will integrate with the back-office applications provided by Microsoft's
Great Plains division, and will be sold by authorized Microsoft Great Plains
channel partners.

Cost per seat pricing was not announced as of this publication, but is
expected to position MS CRM roughly midway between opportunity management
and SFA products such as ACT! and GoldMine at the low end, and the
FrontRange Office Suite and SalesLogix at the mid-market.

Availability of MS CRM is planned for Q4 of this year.Microsoft's entry into
the CRM market represents not only a significant threat, but also the
biggest opportunity that vendors, systems integrators, and end-users with
the technical capability, financial resources, and vision to adapt to
Microsoft's long-term CRM architecture have likely seen for a long time.

Microsoft has established a significant presence in CRM over the past five
years, but has deliberately kept a low profile by supplying the
infrastructure software - operating systems, database software, and browser
technologies - that underpins a majority of the CRM applications in
production today.Microsoft's acquisition of Great Plains Software signaled
the company's intent to move into the applications market - a significant
move for Microsoft and one that went largely unnoticed and uncontested in
the industry. This acquisition, coupled with Microsoft's continued focus on
and investment in .NET, .NET My Services (formerly known as Hailstorm), and
its Passport authentication system, indicates that Microsoft is going to
once again change the rules of the game.

Threat or Opportunity?For the small to medium business (SMB) that recognizes
the value of optimizing its customer relationships, Microsoft's announcement
represents nothing but a new opportunity. The SMB and mid-markets continue
to be the largest opportunity in CRM: Many of the companies in this segment,
with limited financial and technical resources and often legitimate concerns
about lengthy CRM implementations, have largely relied on cobbled-together
or home-grown alternatives based on Outlook and some Excel spreadsheets.The
opportunity to buy what appears to be a cost-effective system from
Microsoft, and one that closely resembles the Office Suite already on the
desktop, will represent an attractive proposition.

And, as .NET technology matures and .NET service offerings become more
widespread, the small business owner will have the opportunity to more
effectively leverage the Internet for its marketing, sales, and customer
support needs.A few opinions have already appeared in the trade press,
predicting that Microsoft will simply roll into the CRM market and take the
entire bottom half of the market as its own. And that would mean any
companies playing in this segment are history.

Microsoft has already clearly articulated its strategy, and MS CRM (and the
.NET and related architectures) back this claim. The impact of this strategy
will eventually be felt in every major business applications market segment,
including CRM, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and e-Business.CRM
represents a beachhead that Microsoft needs to control to accomplish its
objective

Web services in what Microsoft hopes will become an industry-standard
architecture: .NET.There is no doubt that the CRM market will be changed by
Microsoft's MS CRM announcement.

Using data from the Small Business Administration-and guesstimating the
number of (potential) CRM users--we come up with some remarkable market
potential numbers for the USA (readers may want to extrapolate to other
national situations).

. 9,146,441 Small Enterprises have a potential of 20,503,199
seats.
. 339, 552 Medium-size Enterprises have a potential of 11,420,537
seats

In other words, the SME marketplace has a potential of about 30,000,000
users. . and that's a lot of bums on seats!
.

If our calculations for the small business market for CRM solutions are
anywhere nearly accurate, no vendor can afford to ignore a potential of
$20 billion. And, according to Aberdeen Research, a 20,000-pound gorilla
is gearing up to grab a lot of that $20 billion-MICROSOFT!

And many of these 95,000,000 seats with a computer are already equipped
with the basic building blocks of CRM functionality:
. Customer Database (Outlook and Access)
. Customer Communications (Outlook, Word, Explorer)
. Customer (Financial) Analytics (Excel)

Conclusion: There will always be room for vendors of CRM solutions for
small businesses. But Microsoft's technical capabilities and
low-cost/no-cost sales and distribution channels may well change the
CRM/small business paradigm.

CRM FOR MEDIUM-SIZE ENTERPRISES
The CRM market for mid-size companies-with 11 to 100 (potential seats,
according to our definition)-is up for grabs. And there is a lot to
grab.
According to a report by Jupiter Research, "Midsize companies are
showing strong demand for enterprise software,. . . the bulk of the
dollars to drive the market to the next level will come from midsize
businesses, which are more likely to invest in CRM and other
enterprise-grade software." And Jupiter estimates the SME market for
CRM to grow to about $3.4 billion by 2006.
That's why the "SOPS"-Siebel, Oracle, PeoplSoft and SAP-have in
the past offered "light" versions of their enterprise solutions,
(without a great deal of success so far.) But as the enterprise solution
marketplace becomes saturated, they seem to be again gearing up.
There are some CRM vendors focused on that segment. SalesLogix is the
leader, with about 350,000 sites. Pivotal, Onynx and Epiphany are also
in the game, plus hundreds of "Others" are in the race.
Finally, the mid-marketing is particularly interesting because many
large enterprises are actually a conglomeration of mid-size companies
that are empowered to select their own CRM software and design their own
CRM processes.
This fact of life enables some low-cost/mid-market players to enter the
Large Enterprise market, with features desired by big-company users.
. Reasonable cost
. Quick to implement
. Flexible
For instance SuperOffice, a $600 per seat European player, has more
that 1,000 users at insurance giant Aegon. And Commence RM, similar to
SuperOffice except US-based, counts business units of Shell Oil,
Unilever and Brinks among their clients.

Conclusion: The next 1,000 days in the CRM mid-marketplace promise will
be exciting. It's too early to predict the winners, losers and
also-rans. . .

To be honest the simplest way to answer your question is that Microsoft CRM
does precisely what you would expect given that it is a) a new product b) a
new product from Microsoft which means it is a lot further along than "bobs
software company" would be.

My experience with Microsoft resellers is that they are great at
understanding the technical features and integration opportunities but
severely lacking when it comes to mapping organizational and process
transformations and alignment required and especially when it comes to
creating programs to create organizational adoption.

Interestingly Microsoft have said publicly that they are pursuing higher
level consulting firms and influencers but the partner folks I have talked
to at Microsoft have simply quoted the expectations in sales volume so that
would indicate that if Microsoft executives have an objective it isn't being
filtered down.

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